Chronon

15 original time travel stories as told by one of the genre's most original and prolific voices. More

The scene in front of my visor is dark and murky. Like seeing the world through maple syrup, sort of brown and thick. Moving is slow and plodding. I feel like a deep sea diver at a dangerous depth. The pressure of time above me threatens to squeeze me into jelly. My name is Jay Cramp, I’m a chrono-naut and I’m on a mission.Time is thick, thick as soup and the deeper you travel into the past, the heavier and denser it becomes. It has to do with the physics of time. Something scientists have been getting wrong for generations, until now. Now we finally understand that time is particulate in nature. A flowing stream of chronons surround and engulf every instant of reality.A single month’s worth of chronons can barely be weighed with any instrument. A year’s worth registers faintly on our most sensitive scales. Five years down, the pressure accumulates to several atmospheres. It’s a logarithmic scale like the one they use for earthquakes. At the depth I’m at now, 46.22 years, it’s like being at the bottom of the Pacific. Time is dense, dangerous and the going is slow. We used to think time was like a river, how naive we were. Time isn’t like that at all. I wear armor. You wouldn’t last a nano-second in the past without a chrono-suit. The stresses on frail biology are immense, too severe to survive without protection. The past is as inhospitable as outer space. The weight of it wants to crush you like an egg. Special equipment is needed and even then it’s difficult. The past is not a friendly place.

Harris Tobias lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of The Greer Agency , A Felony of Birds and dozens of short stories. His fiction has appeared in Ray Gun Revival, Dunesteef Audio Magazine, Literal Translations, FriedFiction, Down In The Dirt, Eclectic Flash, E Fiction and dozens of other publications. His poetry has appeared in Vox Poetica, The poem Factory and The Poetry Super Highway. You can find links to his novels at: http://harristobias-fiction.blogspot.com/